2026 Agenda

Leadership may be fundamentally underestimating the risks of fragmented data, according to new survey research by Workiva. In a landscape of constant change, the ability to deliver strategic insights faster is a competitive advantage. Executives are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence for timely, strategic decisions, yet a critical bottleneck remains: fragmented data.

This session explores the results of a 2026 global survey of roughly 1,500 finance, risk, and sustainability professionals and 300 institutional investors. Attendees will learn:

• The data problems that leaders and practitioners say are limiting their strategic impact
• The digital transformation projects peers are prioritizing this year
• A path for achieving better business outcomes

Hidden Costs. Murky Contracts. Time to Rethink Your Benefits Strategy.

It’s one thing to put together a benefits program. It’s another to design a benefits strategy. One serves your employees today; the other prepares your business for tomorrow and beyond.

Health benefits should be clear, affordable, and easy for your employees to use. But too often, hidden fees, complex contracts, and lack of transparency keep you in the dark. It’s time to take control. In this presentation, you will learn the three essential areas to focus on with your benefit programs. You’ll leave with practical insights to uncover inefficiencies, reduce spend, and improve member outcomes.

Join bold-thinking financial experts for real talk on what’s broken, what’s working, and what to do next!

Learning objectives:

1. Identify Hidden Costs and Contract Complexities: Understand how hidden fees and murky contract terms impact the overall cost and transparency of healthcare benefits and learn strategies to uncover and address these issues.
2. Evaluate and Rethink Benefits Strategies: Gain insights into designing a forward-looking benefits strategy that balances affordability, transparency, and employee usability, preparing your organization for 2026 and beyond.  Focusing on quality care and steering to centers of excellence vs. cost shift within the plan.
3. Optimize Healthcare Spend and Member Outcomes: Learn innovative new-to-market medical advancements and a different approach to uncover inefficiencies within current benefit programs, reduce unnecessary expenses, and enhance health outcomes for employees.
4. Navigate the Evolving Healthcare Landscape: Develop awareness of current industry challenges and opportunities, enabling you to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing healthcare environment.
5. Implement Actionable Next Steps: Leave with concrete, practical insights and tools to reframe your benefits approach, improve transparency, and better align your healthcare programs with organizational goals.

The mandate for the modern CFO is expanding. Finance leaders are no longer just stewards of the business; they are now pivotal in steering corporate strategy and unlocking enterprise value. This session explores how visionary finance leaders are transforming their roles by leveraging new business models and modern capabilities. We will discuss how to extend finance’s partnership across the business and move from simply reporting information to driving the insightful, scenario-based guidance needed for confident, agile decision-making.

• Elevate the Mandate: Modernize finance processes and become the primary engine of strategic insight
• Guide with Intelligence: Move beyond reactive planning and reporting to providing predictive, scenario-based guidance that fuels confident decisions
• Embed Agility: Build enterprise-wide agility to ensure your organization can pivot at scale as market conditions change
• Connect the Enterprise: Use integrated planning and processes as the connective tissue to elevate decision-making across all business functions

Today’s CFOs are tasked with more than managing the numbers — they’re expected to steer business strategy, build resilience, and guide their organizations through constant change. In this session, Emburse’s CFO will share a playbook for how finance leaders can balance discipline with innovation, drive agility, and foster a culture of data-driven decision-making. Drawing on lessons from their career and perspective as both a finance leader and technology customer, they will offer practical, peer-to-peer insights that attendees can take and apply immediately to their own organizations.

Key Session Takeaways:

• The evolving role of the CFO: from steward of capital to strategic spend orchestrator
• How to balance financial discipline with agility and innovation in uncertain markets
• Lessons from real-world digital transformation and finance modernization efforts
• Practical approaches to embedding data-driven decision-making across the enterprise

CFOs today face increasing risks, fragmented data, and relentless pressure to deliver profitable growth. Gartner estimates 3–8% of EBITDA is lost annually to hidden inefficiencies, leakages, and missed opportunities. Traditional analytics only scratch the surface, whereas AI goes deeper.​
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The AI-Powered Central Insights Factory is a continuous financial intelligence platform that learns, detects, and adapts in real time. It unifies financial and operational data, prevents leakages, uncovers missed revenue, and strengthens trust—empowering CFOs to lead with foresight and precision.​
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This is not automation; it’s transformation. By breaking down silos, upskilling teams, and embedding AI into daily decision-making, finance evolves from a back-office function into a championship engine of growth and resilience.​
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Join MindBridge AI to see this model in action. Hear how Chevron deployed the Central Insights Factory to activate high-value AI use cases, fuel innovation, and maintain a competitive edge.​
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Takeaways for Modern CFOs:​

• Quantify the Invisible: Reclaim the hidden 3–8% EBITDA drain​
• Centralize for Impact: One AI-driven insights factory, infinite value creation​
• Build Championship Teams: Empower finance to drive trust and growth

Agentic AI is changing the game for finance. But it’s not just about automation; it’s about giving finance teams the power to work faster, smarter, and more strategically. From streamlining budgeting to improving scenario modeling and simplifying reporting, AI agents are unlocking new ways to add value.

Join Kyle Trainor, Technology Sales Support Manager at Wolters Kluwer, as we move beyond theory. We’ll dive into real-world examples and a live demo of how Agentic AI can:

• Optimize data preparation
• Improve forecast accuracy
• Simplify data interrogation
• Free your team to focus on big-picture decisions

Discover a clear roadmap for how Agentic AI can deliver a strategic edge so your team can work smarter, reduce inefficiencies, and make more confident decisions.